86.  Dust

Driven by the need to understand, Jayhawk wrote to Dr. McDougall, the
psychiatrist she had dealt with earlier, and asked to talk to him.
She ended up with a daily appointment, over what she guessed must be his
lunch hour--perhaps he didn't want to admit to spending time with an
insubstantial, unverifiable, and non-paying patient.

She'd expected a barrage of tests, some clever attempt to verify her
story, pin down her nature.  Instead he mainly listened to her.  She'd 
tapped into his terminal's graphics routines so that he could actually 
see and hear her, though with the equipment at hand there was no way 
she could hear his replies, and she had to be content with his
one-finger typing.  Sometimes he would ask questions, but they were
seldom the ones she had expected.

He asked her whether she thought Angela was a real person, whether
Jayhawk herself might have forged the Matrix documents that proved her
existance, as well as the email Forked Lightning had recieved from
Angela's friends.  "Why would I do that?" she said in puzzlement.

>I'm not certain.  I'm just trying to cover all the possibilities.

Whereupon he put forward the even odder suggestion that Angela might
have been a *physical* projection of her own personality, an independent
person but created by her.  

>I've heard of such cases.  The age difference is quite characteristic.

"I don't *think* so, I've certainly never had any evidence of it....I
never met Angela before Paradisio, or even heard of her; it's hard for
me to believe we had anything to do with each other."

He had similar questions about Piebald, though her answers were
different; she knew the truth now of his claim to Jayhawk that he,
too, was Jayhawk.  "I saw him at Paradisio, apparently in the flesh; but
I'm not sure.  I'm confused about a lot of the things that happened
there--whether they were stimsense, or Matrix or physical reality.  They
tried to keep me confused."  She told him the story of putting wall
hangings up in her Matrix room, and having the physical analog delivered
to her door.

>Interesting that he's male.  Intuition is usually seen as a feminine
>attribute.

"Usually?  This kind of thing happens to other people?"

>Not exactly, as far as I'm aware, no.

He had a lot more questions than answers, she soon realized.  "Can't you
do anything to find out what I am experimentally?"

>I'll ask Dr. Marsh--he's a colleague of mine who has some experience in
>these matters--and we'll see what he can do.

Over the next lunch break he introduced her to Marsh, whom she remembered 
from her researches into the group was a sorceror of some kind.  After 
five long minutes' silence, Marsh reported that he could sense no trace 
of her presence.

"If I manifested physically, could you do better?"  She remembered
manifestation, and the price it seemed to carry...but she wanted to know
what she could do, and she was intensely curious about what they would
see.  On and off, she suspected that McDougall really didn't believe her
story, and was just stringing her along to observe this interesting new
cyberpsychosis.

>Can you do that?  Without harming yourself?  You expressed some concern 
>about that earlier.

"I'm willing to take the risk."

She had to wait while Marsh and McDougall hiked across campus to their
office.  She spent her time exploring their machine--McDougall had given
her the passwords, though she certainly didn't feel she needed them.  It
was rather a desolate place, apparently little used, not the machine
they received their daily traffic of email on.  By the time they were
ready, she was comfortably familiar with it, and resolved not to harm it
by what she was doing.

She collected herself, visualized the screen as a window through which
she could walk, and stepped forward.  Instantly, warnings flared across
her nerves, utilization levels at Anubis skyrocketing as the system
tried to create a near-complete duplicate of itself.  She felt the
strain as connections frayed, disruptions began to propagate through the
delicate network of her machine.  There was a sharp sound, like breaking
glass, a sharp brief pain with it.  *I didn't want to break anything!*

She was standing on thick carpet in the midst of chaos.  The room was
small and cluttered, bookcases lining the walls.  Every book had been
thrown down, every paper dislodged, and the air was heavy with dust and
lint.  Three men were staring at her warily from the far side of the
room.  She recognized McDougall by the red hair she'd seen in his Net
photograph.  The tall, lanky one who was--He was casting at her!  She
tensed instinctively, felt her toes dig into the carpet, a breath of
wind on her skin.  Nothing more, no spell attacking her.  The third man,
small and dark in drab coveralls, glanced behind her.  She followed his
gaze, saw a dead terminal, its facepiece shattered into tiny shards.

Anubis was struggling to maintain her form, slow progressive
deterioration setting in.  She looked down at herself, saw something
human-shaped, nearly translucent, drab-colored but faintly sparkling.
Slowly, careful to strain Anubis no further, she dropped to one knee,
touched the carpet.  It felt like carpet, though she was aware of the
frenzied processing which maintained that simple sensory contact.

"Jayhawk?" said McDougall uncertainly.

"Yes.  What happened?  I'm sorry about the terminal, I didn't mean to do
that."  Her voice sounded much as she expected, though softer--she had
to strain to be heard clearly.

"Quite all right--it comes off the grant.  There was a--well, a sort of
whirlwind."  His hair was standing nearly on end, one strand slipping
down over his eyes.  He brushed at it absently.  "Are you all right?"

"This is hard, harder than I expected--it's costing me a good deal to
hold."  She looked around, smiled at the other two, who tentatively
smiled back.

"This is Dr. Marsh, and this is Dr. Jones from the computer center--I
think you've talked to him before."  McDougall took a cautious step
forward, staring at her.

"What do I look like?  What do you see?"

She had mainly been talking to Marsh, but McDougall answered first:
"Something like a cloud of dust particles, very thick, in the shape of a
woman.  There's quite a glitter to it, as if it were metallic, though I
don't think it could be.  Rather lovely, actually."

Marsh dropped his eyes, said in an unexpectedly husky voice, "The
nearest thing I've ever seen to you is a great spirit of the air, though
that's not very close.  Not a magician, but extremely magical.  If
you're human you're an enormously powerful one.  Interesting."

"I must have made this form out of the dust in your office."  She would
have done better with something more compatible with her nature, she
realized.  Given flesh, she might be able to stay embodied as long as
she wished.  She thought of Angela--not only flesh, but practically
identical to her own lost body--and shivered.

There was no great joy in it, other than the satisfaction of her
curiosity, and the wonder of being able to do something so clearly
arcane.  She raised her arms, turned slowly, feeling Anubis labor to
maintain her shape.  To herself she felt solid enough, but she could see
the strings behind that illusion.  There was very little here but will
and dust.

"I like to shake hands with my patients," said McDougall, "if you
wouldn't mind--?"

She extended her hand cautiously, ready to react if he squeezed her--she
wasn't sure Anubis could handle that, and wasn't going to risk her
system to find out.  But he barely touched her, a soft brush across her
fingertips.  "What do I feel like?"

He licked his lips, considering words.  "Like a bundle of static
electricity, I think.  Does that disturb you?"

"No....I don't think I should stay here; I'm damaging Anubis.
Repairable, but I'd rather it didn't get any further."

"Can you get back all right?"  He glanced at the broken terminal.

She reached out to touch it, found that it was still linked to the
Matrix; only the picture tube and screen were gone.  It was easy to
return, simply let go of the task of manifestation, let Anubis return to
ground state, dust return to dust.  She found herself within the
machine, the familiar comfort of the Matrix around her.

With the terminal broken, she had no way to communicate with them.
Guessing that it would take them another ten minutes to walk back to the
computer center, she returned to Anubis, began dealing with the damage.
It was not severe, though she was troubled by a nagging sense that
something had been irreparably lost, some small but precious part of her
being.  As she re-established links, knit the complex redundancies and
cross-checking back into form, she considered that.  She was no longer
native to the physical world.  Did she need to be?  Was it a problem to
be tackled, or just another facet of her nature?

If it was a problem, it certainly wasn't the most urgent one.  Running
her personal time up high, she had a good start at the repairs before it
was time to return to McDougall.  She found him at the computer center,
as she had expected; blind to the outside, she couldn't tell if the
others were there.

>Are you all right?

"Yes, though doing that costs me something permanent, some loss--I don't
really know what it is."

>Your soul?

Was she talking to Marsh?  "I don't know.  I don't really know what a
soul is, I guess."

>I need to go now.  Please don't worry about the terminal or the books--
>it's well worth it as a learning experience, for all of us.

"How do you put that down on the grant?"  There was a slight pause.

>Experimental expenditures.  Take care, Jayhawk.  Tomorrow?

"Tomorrow."

She returned to the island-garden, to sit in the warm sun and consider
what she had done.  The sunlight seemed subtly less bright, as if her
act had tarnished it ever so slightly.  She wouldn't be doing that again
soon, she decided.  Perhaps not at all, if she couldn't learn how to
avoid the cost.  She didn't need to.  She had the Overnet and the
Matrix, world in plenty for anything she wanted to do.

--

Copyright 1991 Mary K. Kuhner